Cyborg Bodies Revisited

The Poststructuralist Remedy to Postmodernism

by David Mertz
(413)586-8393
Department of Philosophy
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
quilty@philos.umass.edu

Introduction.

THIS PAPER CONTAINS A VERY CONDENSED, SOMEWHAT ELIPTICAL, VERSION OF A
COMPLICATED SCHEMA OF IDEAS. MAYBE I'LL WRITE A BOOK ON THE TOPIC.

WHAT'S AT ISSUE: WHAT STRIKES ME AS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT OF 1960'S
POST-STRUCTURALIST PHILOSOPHY, IN DECENTERING OR ELIMINATING SUBJECTIVITY AS
THE POINT OF SOCIAL ANALYSIS IS LARGELY BEING ABANDONED NOWADAYS (NOT THAT THE
RM FOLKS ARE TO BE BLAMED).

SEYLA BENHABIB IS GOOD EXAMPLE. IN HER TALK ("SITUATING THE SUBJECT" --
I THINK), WHILE WANTING TO BE POST-KANT, POST-HOMO ECONOMICUS, ETC., SHE
STILL WANTS TO ONTOLOGIZE A SUBJECTIVITY, ALBEIT ONE THAT IS MESTIZO,
SUBALTERN, DIALECTICAL, HISTORICAL, ET ALIA. SO BENHABIB, WHATEVER HER
VIRTUES, IS THE ENEMY.

WHAT I'M DOING IN THE PAPER IMPLICITLY IS DEFENDING ALTHUSSER, LACAN AND
FOUCAULT AGAINST HUMANIST AND COGNITIZE-RATIONALIST TENDENCIES (I.E.
RATIONAL-CHOICE MARXISM, BUT THERE ARE MANY OTHER TARGETS), EVEN WHILE NOT
MENTIONING THEM BY NAME. HARAWAY AND BATAILLE EACH UNDERMINE HUMANIST
UNDERSTANDINGS.

One history of the denaturing of subjectivity, and of
subject(ivat)ed bodies, runs from Nietzsche to Bataille. With
Bataille's bioenergetic retelling of Nietzsche's Heraclitean
Will-to-Power, the principle of an expenditure acting toward the
immanent disincorporation of every constituted body becomes a basic
principle of the organization of life on the surface of the earth. That
is, after Bataille's Accursed Share[Bataille,
1988], we can no longer rely on homeostasis as a property of
biological bodies. But after the fixity of bodies is given up, the
several systems of metaphors of constitutivity based upon the old model
of bodies quickly unravel. If bodies are not stable, self-constituting
systems, neither are the minds metaphorically (or metonymically,
perhaps) cast in their image; and neither is the body politic.
Or rather, to be more careful, the rethinking of the biological body
which Bataille gives us allows a corollary rethinking of our images of
body-like things. This rethinking, which is done throughout Bataille's
works, in turn erases all of our organic models of stability.

Haraway's work presents an intricate series of parallels with the denaturing
of bodies in Bataille [Haraway, 1991]. Her figure for the impossibility of
constituted biological bodies, however, lies not in the biological functions of
sexuality and death (or at least not firstly here), but rather in the image of
the cyborg--a technologically coded and overcoded amalgam of machine
and flesh. Bodies are not homeostatic systems of self-constitution because our
postmodern bodies are always already the artificial constructions of
technologies and technological discourses. Her touch-point is, of course,
Foucault's bio-politics of power, but she goes beyond this as well.

Two inseparable naturalizations of the subject have occupied these last two
hundred years of social and biological thought. The proper names for these two
intertwined naturalizing schemata have been evolutionary biology and
economics. Furthermore, this subject so naturalized is at once, and
immanently, both the subject of an economic/political order and the subject
of a rationalist philosophy of consciousness form Descartes, through Hegel, to
psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology. The series of identities I
mention here has, of course, also been identified by Foucault, in The Order
of Things[Foucault, 1973], so I cannot claim to be original in such
identification. The real concern of these naturalizations of subjectivity in
biology, economics and philosophy has in every case been the provision of a
stable boundary between organism and non-organism, actor and non-actor,
self and non-self. All of this ends, however, with the end of
modernism.

That the conditions of stable subjectivity have been lost or abandoned in the
second half of this century is not really in question. Rather we might ask
whether the very terms of the mainstream loss of subjective closure are
nothing more than the new structures of dominance in post-industrial societies
dominance no longer of bodies, but of networks; no longer of legitimation, but
of information; no longer of constraints on rational choice, but of the
preconditions of rationality but dominance nonetheless. The mainstream loss of
any hermetic subjectivity occurs at the point where the self merges with the
non-self at the external boundaries of constituted being; Haraway marks this
loss in the right-hand column of her series oppositions appearing in her
Cyborg Manifesto, and slightly reworked in her Biopolitics of Postmodern
Bodies. I will discuss some of Haraway's oppositional pairs below, but let us
just inform the listener in advance that this right-hand column expresses, on
each line, an already achieved change in the regulation of society. But
perhaps all of these achieved changes act as mere smokescreens to a deeper
challenge to subjectivity, and to the regulation of society, pointed to by
Bataille.

In this paper I attempt to trace some parallels between the contributions of
these two non-philosophers in the recent history of philosophy. Both serve to
deconstruct the modernist narrative of subjectivity, not in terms of a critique
of the phenomenological presuppositions of the Cartesian project (valuable
though such is), but rather in terms of a denaturing of the very hidden
biological and economic metaphors on which such a narrative is based. Both
open views onto what a post-modern non-subjective politics might look like.

The Field.

Only the briefest review on the common conceptual terms of economics,
evolutionary biology, and rationalist philosophy is here possible; but let me
proceed with a few reminders. Each field is composed of an atomistic
collection of individuals; each individual acts in relation to an external
world through internal representation and rational choice. In the schemata of
all these three disciplines, the basic function of every individual is the
preservation and reproduction of itself as an entity over time; it is here that
representation and rationality function, since the means for
preservation/reproduction are presumed to be in scarce supply in the world, and
hence to require active, purposeful appropriation by the individual in
question. The agenda of the modernist/humanist paradigm in the three above
areas amount to a support of three politically important terms of descriptions
of human existence: purposiveness, identity, and scarcity. These concepts
have fit together in an ideological support of the necessity of Capitalist
society; and hence I will try to rehabilitate Bataille (and Haraway to an
extent) as a radical critic of such a status quo.

Basically, all three of these intertwined conceptual systems biology,
philosophy and economics exclude mimetic-representation of individuals'
exteriors, and demand what Harry Redner calls true representation. In the
simplest terms, what gets represented in the exterior is unlike the
thing which plays the representational role on the interior and hence
representation is a pure formal relation, rather than mere mimetic duplication.
The death of mimesis is generally diagnosed as occurring at precisely the
historical point at which these conceptual systems arise, so a certain
consistency is thereby loaned to our analysis. Let us quickly step through
this conceptual system as it is three times choreographed by our three
fields.

In the non-Marxist economics (and in much of the Marxist ) economics since
Adam Smith, the central trope has been that of the individual who attempts to
preserve/reproduce her existence as owner of commodities through rational
choice and internal representation of economic relations between commodities.
Individual existence as consciousness of subjective position is here identical
with stable identity-over-time of commodity ownership. It is less than half in
jest that I tell my students that Rationalist philospohy of mind has been a
series of efforts to make contracts binding.

Of course, commodities are always understood as alienable by subjects, but
this is always only the contingent alienability of a particular
commodity, not universal alienability of commodity relations themselves.
Just as the Kantian necessary unity of aperception answers the Humean
skepticism about the contingency of particular impressions, the Smithian
necessary unity of commodity ownership answers some nameless skeptic of
private property. Continuing concretely the sketch given abstractly above,
interior represents exterior in the relation between use-value and
value. Value is the external, intersubjective existence of every scarce
commodity; while use-value is the interior representation of commodities for
subjectivity. The particular distinction of use-value and value is from Marx,
but all economists repeat it in some language or another. Regarding much of
this, read Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour[Sohn-Rethel, 1978], a much under-appreciated book.

An almost identical trope is repeated in the coeval history of evolutionary
biology. A biological organism is presumed to organize itself around the
dictates of preservation of its unity through the utilization of a various
scarce particulars: food supply and optimal sexually-reproductive
opportunities. The fundamental opposition is between self and
non-self, and stable, identifiable boundaries are demanded. The same
representational schema is played through here in evolutionary biology as in
economics: this time the individual is called the phenotype; the
representable exterior is called the environment; the interior
representation is called the genotype. As in the economic schema,
continued identity depends upon continually re-entering into relation with
separate particular exterior objects, but it must be a self-identical
individual which enters into universal relation to an external
environment.

Our trope is repeated once more in Rationalist phenomenological philosophy.
The stable subjective consciousness aware of itself constitutes its universal
unity in the perceptability of particular phenomena. Contra any Humean
skepticism, the Cartesian/Kantian subject is stable across the accidents of
particular impressions of which consciousness is necessarily composed. The
representational nature of the modernist image of consciousness has been widely
discussed in recent philosophy; however, what may be less obvious is the
principle of scarcity entailed by this image. Inasfar as the modernist
subject percieves the world as objective, it always posits an inadequacy
to the actual phenomenal experiences. In Nietzsche's phrase, the modernist
consciousness posits lightning behind the flash. The scarcity of the
phenomena make it necessary to husband the actual phenomena to reproduce
further phenomena behind the phenomena. The objectivity of the physical world,
for the modernist subject, I maintain, answers the inadequacy of the phenomenal
one.

Haraway.

Everything just described ended at least thirty years ago. Haraway diagnoses
this change, and the associate loss of unity of subjectivity under the newer
informatics of domination as she calls it. The change diagnosed, and to a
great extent embraced, by Haraway concerns the point at which the self in the
discussed conceptual system merges into non-self at the external boundaries of
the previously stable self. The move away from our conceptual system of
unitary identity occupies a myriad of different particular disciplines or
fields. Those, at least, of evolution, economics and phenomenology are
included, but the transition is still broader than this. Several names for two
contrastive historical periods the more recent starting near the middle of the
twentieth century have been proposed. Sometimes the distinction between
modernism and postmodernism is utilized; others times, that between monopoly
capitalism and multinational capitalism, or between society of the commodity
and society of the spectacle, are preferred. Other names are sometimes used
as well.

Without putting to fine a point on the particular terminology used for these
contrastive periods, let us take a look at some particular
conceptual/historical items juxtoposed by Haraway. All of them tend to have
the same moral. The transition which has occurred has occurred at many levels
at once: it has been a change in the product of industrial production; a
change in the process of industry; and a change in the conceptualization of
humans and the world. This conceptualization itself will be treated in its
aspects as economics, evolution, and phenomenology. Close homologies exist
between each type of change. Let us examine the these changes in the order
listed: product, process, conception.

The product of industry used to be things; now it's information. This change
is a matter of degrees, not absolutes, of course but the change is pretty
overwhelming when in the 1990's well over half the national product of
industrial countries measured simply in monetary terms is information.
Clearly, such a share was a mere few percent at the beginning of this century.
The change here mentioned was mostly clearly diagnosed by the Situationists,
whom I find very interesting, although I can only speculate about Haraway's
debt to themy. A few of the pairs in Haraway's repeated chart of oppositions
point to this change. The pairs representation/simulation and heat/noise make
this fairly explicit. Where industrial production of things could be
carried on wholly with a representation of the combinative process of inputs (a
diagram for assembling an object, for example), production of
information always involves a second order simulation of the consumer of
the information; information's production can be neither conceptualized nor
carried out without having already achieved its consumption. In a way, we
could say paradoxically that information has no inputs, but only outputs. The
heat/noise pair refers to the inefficiencies within any productive process.
But where the wasted inputs of a mechanical industrial process are dissipated
as heat, the waste in an informational productive process is dissipated as
noise ('noise' has the sense of the word given in computer and communications
technologies: noise is whatever isn't signal).

The process of production used to be concerned with the expression of human
abilities by the utilization of mechanical assistance. Now just the reverse is
dominant: it is human-beings themselves who are mere biological prosthetics to
productive machines whether robotic or informational machines, though the
former will be those addressed herein directly. A pair such as Labor/Robotics
makes this clear; as does that between Organic division of labor and
Ergonomics/cybernetics of labor. The transition from a Taylorist
micro-engineering of human motion to a cybernetic planning of a total
productive process completely decenters any human subject in the process. Once
upon a time it made sense to speak of the extension of human-beings' powers
through machinery, but no longer is the human body a stable center and locale
of productive processes. The distinction between the biotic and mechanical
portions of productive machines has become entirely artificial.

The conceptual parallel to the change in productive product and process is at
least threefold. In economics, with Fordism and Keynesianism (to say nothing
of Baudrillard) the questions of rational commodity choice is subsumed to the
centrally-managed continuation of the generalized system of exchange. Both
producer and consumer have fallen out as anything other than statistically
amalgamated tendencies: there is no subject doing any of this.

In biology, the paradigm changes from a focus on organisms to a focus on
biotic components and populations. The boundaries of a biological organism
become merged with the breeding community in which it is embedded. Another of
Haraway's pairs, Reproduction/Replication indicates the loss of the
representational paradigm as well. Genotype no longer represents
environment, since no stable organismic interior and exterior exist to define
such representation. Rather, genes individually simply replicate in identical
form. This brings us back to something akin to mimesis, but it's not quite
identical to the earlier mimetic schema.

In phenomenological philosophy, much the same loss of the boundaries of
subjective identity occurs, for example with Foucault. The subject becomes
wholly subject of various systems of societal power, and the locus of
identity is no longer coherently that of a Cartesian/Kantian subjectivity.
Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek [Zizek, 1992] identifies
something like the contrast I am about to draw between Haraway and
Bataille, between that parallel ratio Foucault/Lacan. That is where the
first in each pair identifies a loss of subjectivity where subjectivity
is pushed outward past the exterior bounds of its intelligibility, the
latter identifies the loss of subjectivity at the very most interior
point of subjectivity, and hence makes a much more radical gesture. It
can be no accident in this regard that Bataille and Lacan were each, at
different times, married to the same woman.

Bataille.

In his works, Bataille, as we have said, recognizes a loss of subjectivity at
the very core of subjectivity. Further, he identifies this loss simultaneously
in the three fields we have been discussing: evolutionary biology, economics,
and phenomenological philosophy. He also finds these three fields to suffer
inseperably from a common misunderstanding in their common effort to uphold the
modernist conceptual scheme we have discussed.

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy of the
surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for
maintaining life; the excess energy can be used for the growth of a system
(e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot
be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without
profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

As a rule the surface of the globe is invested by life to the extent possible.
By and large the myriad forms of life adapt it to the available resources, so
that space is its basic limit.

Bataille at various places writes about his biological understanding in a
Nietzschean way (my own Nietzsche is colored by Deleuze): A reactive force is,
firstly, a force which is dominated. An active force is a force which
dominates. One may not exist without the other. Consciousness, for example,
which is always a product of resentment, is a reactive force. We could explain
this, as a first attempt, in a Freudian way: consciousness (ego and superego)
is a mental force created to by dominated by the id, in order that the id does
not directly exercise its dominating potential. Historically, consciousness
must be developed by those unable or unwilling to dominate.
Will-to-power is the principle of the synthesis of forces; or,
perhaps, the principle which allows for a difference/antagonism of forces.

To place this in Bataille's picture we should consider will-to-power
the general bio-energetic principle of life; the generalized completeness of
the extension of the biosphere in every possible direction, and the consequent
necessity of an overall non-productive expenditure of energy. In this picture,
no use of solar energy is possible in a generalized way; and insofar as such a
use is possible in a particular instance it is only by displacement of
necessary expenditure to a different place within the biosphere. The
displacer, that individual, species or other unit, which succeeds in
temporarily displacing the necessity of expenditure elsewhere constitutes an
active force. The location of displacement, which must increase-perhaps to the
point of its complete extermination-its non-productive expenditure, becomes a
reactive force. An active force must, however, become a reactive force when it
is no longer able to maintain its new degree of accumulated energy.

Concretely, take as an example two chlorophyllic species of single celled
organisms completely covering the surface of a pond. One species (or call it
an individual if you like since every unit is genetically identical) can
expand only at the expense of the territory covered by the other. Each species
continues to absorb radiation from the sun, which brings it chemically to a
state where some of its cells must either reproduce or die. If the latter,
they dissipate the energy which they have absorbed in their mitochondria in a
manner useless to the organism/species; if the former then they must cause just
such a dissipation in cells of the other species. Most likely, each species
becomes at the same time reactive and active--some cells die at the same time
as other cells succeed in displacing those of the other species to reproduce
though, of course, there may well be a preponderance of domination in one
direction. Even if the entire pond becomes monogenetic in the struggle for
dominance, will-to-power does not thereby disappear. It merely operates
instead exclusively at the level of individual cells.

What Bataille's picture has done is to reverse the Darwinian conceptual schema
of evolutionary pressure in two ways. In the first place, there is no longer
any principle of scarcity in an organisms relation to environment just the
opposite, there is always an overabundance of resources, more than can ever be
utilized. In the second place, there is no longer even really a bounded
organism. Inside and outside no longer make sense not because of a kind of
interactionist merging of an organism with symbiots and environment as with
those changes Haraway analyzes but because the very active force which defines
an organisms boundaries has as its immanent tendency the disincorporation of
those same limits. The accumulation of energy defining each organism is
internally the accumulation of the conditions of the destruction of that
organism.

Bataille makes precisely this same move with his analyses of economics and of
subjectivity. With economics, first, Bataille identifies the central principle
of his general economy opposed to the restricted economy of
neo-classical economics as expenditure, or as the accursed share.
That is, every society produce in excess of the minimal requirements of its own
reproduction (including the physical reproduction of its human beings); and
hence the excess of its product must be somehow expended in strictly
non-productive activity. Various societies manage this excess in a variety of
manners whether in Potlatch, religious sacrifice, luxury consumption, war, or
in other ways but every society, by necessity, manages this excess somehow.
From the perspective of general economy, all these forms mentioned are
generically forms of waste; and waste is dominant in all societies to
such an extent as to make scarcity meaningless, or even paradoxical. The
problem solved by every economic system is not one of managing scarse
resources, but rather one of getting rid of all the stuff it produces which is
not utilizable in the reproduction of the same economy. This is true just as
much in subsistence and hunter-gatherer societies as it is in consumer
capitalism; just the particular excesses and strategies for squandering them
differ.

The second modernist conceptual paradigm that of boundary is similarly
abandoned in Bataille's general economy. There is no longer any closed
circuit of production, because every object in a rational economy of
production functions simultaneously in a fundamentally irrational circuit of
expenditure/consumption. There is no longer any Smithean transcendental unity
of alienability, because that accursed share which is alienated as pure
sacrifice undermines the whole basis of the commodities-system in the exchange
of equivalents.

Finally, subjectivity suffers the very same immanent disappearance with
Bataille as have economy and evolutionary biology. If the conceptual field
which had created the Rationalist notion of a stable philosophical subject had
depended on the theoretical and practical naturalizations of economics and
biology, then the reversal of these naturalizations leads automatically to a
reversal of the form of subjectivity. Such, anyway, is the argument made by
Bataille. Even if a subjective disincorporation does not necessarily
follow the disincorporation of its economic and biological metaphors, such a
disincorporation is independently argued for by Bataille.

Bataille's analysis centers around desire and sexuality at the
core of subjectivity. Desire is always implicit in every rational conception
of the world, and of self and yet it is the one aspect of world and self which
is never fully conceptualizable by self. Desire is the very ground of self in
what is fundamentally non-self: the organic basis of consciousness. This
non-self at the basis of self lies in the primary drive to sacrifice,
which is always at its basest core a sacrifice of self itself, before it
is a sacrifice of anything else. The sacrifice of self at the core of human
existence, however, is nothing more than the general form of all biological
existence. It is the active-force in Will-to-Power which is always immanently
the becoming of a reactive-force; it is the accumulation of biotic energy whose
accumulation only leaves more to be expended in death; it is the acquisition of
commodities whose abundance demands their sacrifice in non-productive
utilization.